Licorne's Retreat: Contemporary Greek Fashion Designers

Avery interesting article about fashion today from Athens News:

Monsters in Fashion

Christy Papadopoulou, 8 May 2010

BY INVESTING the human body with monstrous and grotesque characteristics, more designers internationally are creating playful and avant-garde costumes that question conventional perceptions of beauty and are making their way into visual codes and media.

Alexis Themistocleous, Out of this World collection (2010) - photo: Demetris Vattis

The growing influence of the so-called character figures in the realm of fashion and costume design, particularly strong on the catwalks over the last decade, is the focus of an upcoming exhibition running at the New Benaki Museum’s Pireos annex from May 15 to July 31.

The latest offering of the non-profit Atopos Contemporary Visual Culture, Arrrgh! Monsters in Fashion is the product of an original three-year research project, the first one in its field, according to curator Vassilis Zidianakis. The project will be launched in June by Pictoplasma Publishing in Berlin under the title NOT A TOY. Fashioning Radical Characters.

The much-anticipated show features over 80 costumes as well as masks and vinyl toys by 50 designers and artists, all on loan from prestigious institutions in Greece and abroad, including the Museum of the History of the Greek Costume, the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation V Papantoniou, the Miyake Issey Foundation (Japan) and the ModeMuseum Province of Antwerp (Belgium).

Creations by international fashion design studios and artists including Issey Miyake, Maison Martin Margiela, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac and Charlie Le Mindu among others join those by Greek designers Digitaria, Cyprus-born Alexis Themistocleous (who mainly specialises in props for fashion photography) and George Tourlas, the exhibition’s poster illustration.

Asked to explain the history of character figures, Zidianakis locates it in 50s America and Japan. Originally, he says, they were “conceived as promotional products in advertising campaigns. They soon made the transition into other areas, including street art, video games, graphic design, animation films and vinyl toys. The idea was that any object or form could become a character figure by acquiring anthropomorphic features.”

Zidianakis interprets the phenomenon as a manifestation of visual communication in the same way that people today send smiley or sad faces on their e-mail or mobile messages to convey psychological situations. “When I started working on this project,” Zidianakis reflects, “I was very much interested in whether grotesque figures have an impact on the human body. The human body is of great interest to me, be it in its nudity or through the way people have chosen since the beginning of time to adorn themselves or create certain dress codes.”

He points to the increasingly changing perceptions with regard to what is beautiful and what is monstrous over the years. The large corpus of work he has come across as part of his research on the subject has one thing in common - “the absence of the human face and in other cases its distortion or its covering up with a mask”, he notes.

“I believe that aesthetic perceptions keep changing all the time,” Zidianakis points out. “It’s part of our nature, and we should not fear it”. Although at first sight the body’s reinventions may strike the viewer as bizarre or unnatural, he believes they are the natural continuation of aesthetic variations adopted by different tribes in the past.

Employing bold colours, abstract elements and supernatural features, the experimental, hybrid creations making up Arrrgh! Monsters in Fashion reflect their creators’ vivid imagination. “As much as they are suggestions on reinventing the human body,” Zidianakis points out, “they are not meant to be worn out in the streets. This is the freedom of creative fashion.”

He thus refers to the show as a mostly “anti-fashion exhibition”. “What interests me is fashion in the sense of the word mode - the way things are done - and not as the fashion system itself,” he explains. “The show is not about what can be worn but about our confrontation with The Other, the different, what could be the other self we are constantly in search of. It is ultimately a show about diversity, about being different.”

Beyond making a fashion statement, Arrrgh! Monsters in Fashion has another aspect to it, according to Zidianakis. “It is more like a suggestion to take a look at our inner self and confront our fears and desires.”

Flying the flag for Greece abroad

Atopos was named after the ancient Greek word denoting the strange, eccentric and the unclassifiable. The non-profit cultural organisation was founded in Athens in 2003 by curator Vassilis Zidianakis and Stamos Fafalios to implement innovative projects of contemporary visual culture, with particular emphasis on the human figure and costumes. Fafalios, whose previous commitments include organising fundraising events in London for the promotion of Greek culture abroad, wanted to show that “there is more to contemporary Greece than exhibitions about Byzantium, archaeology and classical antiquity.”

There is a modern aspect of Greek culture which is not known abroad,” he further notes. “We are interested in contemporary visual culture and our research activity includes exhibitions, workshops and publications which are first launched in Greece in the hope of attracting international interest in the long run”.

Atopos has participated recently in the exhibition Ptychoseis: Folds and Pleats. Drapery from Ancient Greek Dress to 21st Century Fashion, held at the Benaki Museum during the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, and RRRIPP! Paper Fashion in 2007. Following its launching at the Benaki, the travelling show visited the Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg, the ModeMuseum in Antwerp and the Museum Bellerive in Zurich. Since 2010, the Barbican International Enterprises Ltd has undertaken the exhibition’s promotion and touring.

Arrrgh!

Monsters in Fashion is on at the New Benaki Museum (cnr 138 Pireos and Andronikou sts,

tel 210-345-3111) from May 15 to July 31. Opening: May 14 at 8pm